Why site speed matters for SEO and conversions
Every extra second of load time costs you visitors, customers and search ranking. A practical look at what actually moves the needle.
When I talk to a client about a new website, most of them have a list of three things: a nice design, being visible on Google, and having it actually work. And then there's the one thing that ties all three together — speed.
Google measures speed. And penalises slow sites.
Core Web Vitals aren't marketing jargon. They're real metrics that Google actively factors into how it ranks pages. If your site takes more than 2.5 seconds to show its main content, you slip down the search results.
The three numbers I watch on every site I build:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — target under 2.5s
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — target under 0.1
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — target under 200ms
A slow site = a lost customer
Studies from the past few years all agree on one thing: every extra second increases bounce rate by tens of percent. If you run an e-shop, a slow site directly cuts your revenue — even for visitors who arrived from paid ads.
Put differently: you're paying for visitors that your own website is killing.
What usually kills speed
In 90% of the cases I look at, the culprits are these:
- Uncompressed images — photos uploaded straight from a camera into WordPress
- Too much JavaScript — themes bundling libraries the site doesn't even use
- Render-blocking fonts and styles — loading before the content renders
- No caching — every visit re-downloads everything
Fixes are usually neither expensive nor complicated — often it's a matter of server configuration, WebP-converting images, and trimming unused scripts.
How to check your own site
Open PageSpeed Insights and paste your URL. If you're under 80 on mobile, you have work to do. Under 50, fix it immediately — you're losing both customers and ranking.
Want help with it? Drop me a message and I'll show you exactly where your site is leaking.